Virtual QWERTY Keyboards to be used with Fingers...

Shawn Rutledge shawn.t.rutledge at gmail.com
Mon Mar 3 20:34:14 CET 2008


On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 12:47 AM, Karsten Ensinger
<karsten.at.openmoko at onlinehome.de> wrote:
> Sorry to jump into the thread this late, but I am wondering
>  if you already examined the following Wiki-Link?
>  We had a very extensive discussion about text input running
>  on the community list several months ago.
>  Nearly all proposals were documented on the following Wiki:
>
>  http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Wishlist:Text_Input
>
>  My personal favourites are the Quickwriting (there is even
>  a java demo available) and "another text input" (although
>  it seems to be another implementation of this more moko-like
>  implementation: http://www.micropp.se/openmoko/splash.html ).

I think for the finger use case, Raster's idea sounds very well
thought-out, especially the part about choosing the dictionary
according to context and selecting most-likely words or commands.  I
just hope we don't end up infringing any Apple patents.  :-)  I think
the keyboard should have fewer and larger keys though; the one in the
November release has such tiny ones that you can hardly read them.
There's nothing wrong with switching to another view to get the
"extra" keys (e.g. any punctuation beyond period, comma and @-sign) as
long as the switching is easy.

For the stylus case, I like this one:

http://www.strout.net/info/ideas/hexinput.html

and after implementing a prototype I think I like the experience of
using it, too.  It is something extra to learn, though, and one is not
always using a stylus.  In the end it should be possible to implement
various kinds of entry methods, and people will have their preferences
about which one to actually use.

The teenagers know T9 pretty well nowadays (can type without looking)
but that's on a tactile keyboard, not a touchscreen.  Goes to show how
adaptable people are, I guess.




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